2008 Olympics brought to you by Silverlight

On 8-8-08 the 2008 Summer Olympic Games will officially kick off in Beijing, China. This event always amazes me in its unique ability to bring together people from all walks of life across the world.It is a great opportunity to see some extraordinary feats by amazing athletes.These Olympic games will be covered more extensively on the web than ever before.

We have signed an agreement to partner with NBC Universal to build a Silverlight 2.0 based web broadcast of the 2008 Summer Olympic games. This agreement also sets MSN as the official home of the 2008 Summer Olympics.

As a part of this, we will provide users with exclusive access to over 3000 hours of live and on-demand video content via Silverlight streaming. This means that viewers can access every minute of every event. Additionally, the amount of meta-data attached to each of the streams will be extensive and include links to player bios, medal counts, shortcuts to particular events (i.e. athlete x’s third long-jump attempt), maps of the Olympic facilities, pop-up overlays with real-time event alerts, headlines, video search capabilities, etc.

It is exciting to see Silverlight be the catalyst to turn “NBCOlympics.com on MSN” into a ground breaking site and video experience that will redefine sports content online and in some small way we can be part of this historic event.